Middle age, for many, marks a key period for a radical reappraisal of one's life and way of living. The sense of time running out, both from the perspective that one's life has ground to a halt, and from the point of view of the greater closeness of death, and the sense of loneliness engendered by the compromised and wasteful nature of life, become ever clearer in mid-life, and can lead to a period of dramatic self doubt.In this book, (...) the philosopher Christopher Hamilton explores the moods, emotions and experiences of middle age in the contemporary world, seeking to describe and analyze that period of life philosophically. Hamilton draws on his own personal experiences of turning 40 as well as a wide range of sources - from the philosophical writings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger to the literature of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Conrad and the films of Woody Allen - to offer us a philosophy of middle age.Some of the many fascinating themes explored include the strong sense of nostalgia experienced in mid-life, of loss for one's youth, and of regret, the sense that life has become boring, the recognition that one can never fully escape feelings of guilt, and - central to the experience of middle age - the question of what is the point of going on at all. In the light of the 'melancholy wisdom' of mid-life Hamilton suggests that pleasure becomes much more important than at previous stages of life and he shows that the enjoyment of pleasure can be something noble.Insightful, entertaining, and thought-provoking, "Middle Age" is fascinating reading and for anyone heading for a 'mid-life crisis' it is much cheaper than buying a sports car. (shrink)

Middle age, for many, marks a key period for a radical reappraisal of one's life and way of living. The sense of time running out, both from the perspective that one's life has ground to a halt, and from the point of view of the greater closeness of death, and the sense of loneliness engendered by the compromised and wasteful nature of life, become ever clearer in mid-life, and can lead to a period of dramatic self doubt.In this book, (...) the philosopher Christopher Hamilton explores the moods, emotions and experiences of middle age in the contemporary world, seeking to describe and analyze that period of life philosophically. Hamilton draws on his own personal experiences of turning 40 as well as a wide range of sources - from the philosophical writings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger to the literature of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Conrad and the films of Woody Allen - to offer us a philosophy of middle age.Some of the many fascinating themes explored include the strong sense of nostalgia experienced in mid-life, of loss for one's youth, and of regret, the sense that life has become boring, the recognition that one can never fully escape feelings of guilt, and - central to the experience of middle age - the question of what is the point of going on at all. In the light of the 'melancholy wisdom' of mid-life Hamilton suggests that pleasure becomes much more important than at previous stages of life and he shows that the enjoyment of pleasure can be something noble.Insightful, entertaining, and thought-provoking, "Middle Age" is fascinating reading and for anyone heading for a 'mid-life crisis' it is much cheaper than buying a sports car. (shrink)

Philosophers often focus on topics such as death and old age, and much less on other stages of life. The British-American philosopher Kienan Setiya (2017) has recently taken on the topic of middle age from a philosophical perspective and offered suggestions for dealing with the angst often associated with mid-age. His suggestions are based on both his own experiences and practical thoughts based on his readings of other philosophers during their mid-life periods. My own contribution is to describe his (...) thoughts and add a few observations of my own. (shrink)

The ARAROEM project stands for the Archives from Rhône-Alpes and Romandie gathering ephemeral objects inspired by medievalism. This is a project of research and of scientific education, which aims to collect and analyse multiples products made by craftspeople and industrial companies interested by the imaginary of Middle Ages. With a clear methodology, the project investigates three fundamental criteria to understand the Ephemeral Medievalist Objects (EMO): the symbolic value of the objects, the product lifespan and the durability. It involves various (...) disciplines such as medieval history, medievalisn, semiology, economy, sociology, anthropology and ecology. (shrink)

This book presents the first study of the development of the theory of modal syllogistic in the Middle Ages.

Introduction The editors of this volume hope that it will prove useful for the study of philosophy in the Middle Ages by virtue of the comprehensiveness of ...

The articles in this volume dedicated to Hans Daiber, one of the pioneering scholars in the history of Islamic thought in the Middle Ages, offer new insights into this field from a variety of perspectives: philological, philosophical, and historical.

Declarative memory abilities change across adulthood. Semantic memory and autobiographic episodic knowledge can remain stable or even increase from mid- to late adulthood, while episodic memory abilities decline in later adulthood. Although it is well known that prior knowledge influences new learning, it is unclear whether the experiential growth of knowledge and memory traces across the lifespan may drive favorable adaptations in some basic memory processes. We hypothesized that an increased reliance on memory integration may be an adaptive mechanism to (...) handle increased interference from accumulating memory traces and knowledge across adulthood. In turn, this may confer an improved ability for integration, observable in middle-age, before the onset of major aging-related declines. We further tested whether the hypothesized increase would be associated with previously observed reductions in memory discrimination performance in midlife. Data from a sample of healthy middle-aged and younger adults did not support the hypothesis of improved integration, as assessed by an associative inference paradigm. Instead, age-equivalent performance on both integration and discrimination measures were observed [Bayes factors 10 = 0.19–0.25], along with expected higher verbal knowledge and slower perceptual speed for middle-aged [10 = 8.52–73.52]. The results contribute to an increased understanding of memory processing in midlife, an understudied portion of the lifespan, and suggest that two core episodic memory processes, integration and discrimination, can be maintained in healthy middle-aged adults. (shrink)

Religion and philosophy as two mutually exclusive domains experienced a paradigm shift during the Middle Ages. Philosophy became a vehicle of religion through which both Islamic and Christian thinkers developed a rational understanding of faith to develop new philosophical ideas. Using the systematic literature review methodology, with rigorous inclusion and exclusion criteria, this study analyzed several research articles with the use of keywords in reliable databases like ERIC and Google Scholar. The investigation of the relationships between philosophical speculation and (...) religious belief in early Middle Ages exposed the philosophical underpinnings of religion. It was felt that a religious belief was a core conviction that can be upheld logically without having to draw conclusions from other beliefs. It was also found that the study of a wide range of aspects of life is the primary goal of philosophy, an ancient academic subfield. It is recommended that both religion and philosophy should have combined foundations to resolve all sorts of queries, responses, and arguments, which can be defended by various ideologies. Let religion and philosophy be practiced in wide range of contexts, both should study people’s beliefs and behaviors in response to different situations. (shrink)

Is it possible to be a citizen of the world? Cosmopolitan thought has been at the center of recent debates surrounding human rights, legal obligations, international relations and political responsibility. Most of these debates trace their origins to the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century or to the teaching of Greek and Roman philosophers. This collection of essays uncovers a wide array of medieval writings on cosmopolitan ethics and politics, writings generally ignored or glossed over in contemporary discourse. Medieval literary fictions (...) and travel accounts provide us with rich contextualizations of the complexities and contradictions of cosmopolitan thought. (shrink)

This is an anthology of literary, religious, and philosophical texts from the entire Middle Ages and the early modern age that address already quite explicitly religious toleration and even tolerance.

"Illustrations and narrative work together in this book to present medieval culture as one visual image. Drawing extensively from a wide range of primary source material, the breadth and originality of Kleinschmidt's study will have an important influence on scholarly perception of the middle ages, as a period of continual change and continually changing attitudes."--BOOK JACKET.

The contributors to this volume examine the diverse roles played by moral virtues in the political writings of the Later Middle Ages. Medieval political thought has a long tradition of scholarship, and its ethical dimension has always received sustained attention. This volume specifically concentrates on the meaning and function of virtues in a political context, a theme which has thus far been neglected. The authors deal with Latin texts (occasionally in combination with vernacular ones) from the 13th to 15th (...) centuries that define, legitimize, or criticize secular rule by using catalogues of virtues, originating from ancient philosophy as well as Christian moral theology. The medieval texts under discussion are of French, German, English, Italian, and Spanish origin, and vary from educational treatises and historiography to moral theology and political philosophy. (shrink)

The late Middle Ages witnessed a recapitulation of medieval reflection on beauty. Jean Gerson is an important representative of these philosophical and theological contributions, although he has been largely neglected up to this time. A first dimension of his ideas on beauty is the incorporation of beauty (pulchrum) into the number of transcendentals, i.e., the concepts “convertible” with the notion of being (ens), that is, unity, truth, and goodness (unum, verum and bonum). This article revisits Monica Calma’s study on (...) Gerson’s theory of beauty and suggests new hypothetical sources that may have inspired this aspect of his thought. The second aspect emphasised here is Gerson’s classification of beauty, which entails some similarities to the one of Ulrich of Strasbourg, but also differs from it. Moreover, its incorporation of a division entirely devoted to artistic beauty is highly remarkable. (shrink)

Modern interpreters have variously cast the Middle Ages as a benighted past from which the West had to evolve and, more recently, as the model for a potential ...

Historiography realized that the Middle Ages were not the “dark ages” of the European civilization. On the contrary, the period generated a series of ideas and phenomena that are associated with the modern period. At the beginning, the first chiefs of states started by establishing connections with the church authority (through the rituals of crowning, anointing, or through the magic powers attributed to the king’s touch). Gradually, and due to the contribution of some important thinkers (such as Thoma d’Aquino, (...) Dante or Marsilio di Padova), the fundaments of the rational concept of the state organization were settled, in the transition period of the XIIIth- XIVth centuries. The author discusses these ideas (of the natural rights, of the conciliar doctrine) underlining their importance in the formation of the modern paradigm. (shrink)

The majority of The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam has been published previously in different forms, but this edition has been completely revised by the author, the well-known French medievalist and intellectual historian Rémi Brague. It was first published in French under the title Au moyen du Moyen Âge in 2006. The book consists of sixteen essays ranging from Brague’s early years at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris I) in the 1990s up (...) until 2005. As a collection of articles, therefore, The Legend of the Middle Ages is not designed to be a monograph; one should not expect a single argument from the book, although it does explore key intersections of medieval religion and philosophy that I will touch upon later. (shrink)

Romano Guardini does not want to replicate the medieval world, but he finds in the union of « faith and world » which he considers typical of the Middle Ages a useful means to avoid any dictatorship in Europe. The Middle Ages becomes therefore a political model for contemporary society. To refer to this theory, the Author usea the expression «Newest Middle Ages».

Although'Otherness' is an extremely common phenomenon in every society, related research is still at its beginnings.'Otherness' in the Middle Ages is a versatile and complex theme that covers a great number of different aspects, facets, and approaches: from non-human monsters and cultural strangers from remote places up to foreigners from another country or another town; it can refer to ethnic, cultural, political, social, sexual, or religious'Otherness', inside or outside one's own community. In any case, however,'Otherness' is a subjective phenomenon (...) depending on personal views and ascriptions, an issue of'imagination' and experience rather than'reality'. There is neither one single model of alterity nor is'Otherness' a stable phenomenon, but it changes over time and according to the cultural context. All this calls for methodological reflection and needs thorough investigation.00The methodological introduction and the 18 contributions of this volume demonstrate the great diversity of the theme and its different manifestations and perspectives. They tackle the problem from distinct angles and disciplines (history, art history, archaeology, literary history, and philology) in a wide chronological and thematic frame, using different methodological approaches, dealing with different areas (from Northern and Southern Europe to Byzantium and India), perspectives (including law, social order, the past, a sea), and diverse kinds of sources. They examine all kinds of'Otherness' mentioned above, highlight demarcation and rejection, aversion or acceptance, assimilation and integration, thus relativizing a strict dichotomy between'the Self' and'the Other' or between inside and outside. This volume is so far the most comprehensive attempt to tackle the huge problem of'Otherness' in the Middle Ages. (shrink)

This collection of essays argues that any valid theory of the modern should—indeed must—reckon with the medieval. Offering a much-needed correction to theorists such as Hans Blumenberg, who in his _Legitimacy of the Modern Age_ describes the “modern age” as a complete departure from the Middle Ages, these essays forcefully show that thinkers from Adorno to Žižek have repeatedly drawn from medieval sources to theorize modernity. To forget the medieval, or to discount its continued effect on contemporary thought, is (...) to neglect the responsibilities of periodization. In _The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages_, modernists and medievalists, as well as scholars specializing in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century comparative literature, offer a new history of theory and philosophy through essays on secularization and periodization, Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, Heidegger’s scholasticism, and Adorno’s nominalist aesthetics. One essay illustrates the workings of medieval mysticism in the writing of Freud’s most famous patient, Daniel Paul Schreber, author of _Memoirs of My Nervous Illness_. Another looks at Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s _Empire_, a theoretical synthesis whose conscientious medievalism was the subject of much polemic in the post-9/11 era, a time in which premodernity itself was perceived as a threat to western values. The collection concludes with an afterword by Fredric Jameson, a theorist of postmodernism who has engaged with the medieval throughout his career. _Contributors_: Charles D. Blanton, Andrew Cole, Kathleen Davis, Michael Hardt, Bruce Holsinger, Fredric Jameson, Ethan Knapp, Erin Labbie, Jed Rasula, D. Vance Smith, Michael Uebel. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to analyze the variability of the "Self-made-man" idea in the context of the Christian Middle Ages in its primarily historical and philosophical presentation. Research is based on the historical and philosophical analysis of the medieval philosophy presented foremost by the works of Aurelius Augustine, P. Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, and also by the modern researches of this epoch. Theoretical basis. Historical, comparative, and hermeneutic methods became fundamental for this research. Originality. The conducted analysis allowed (...) to draw a conclusion that, despite the still existing view of the Middle Ages as a kind of an ideological gap in the formation of the self-determination idea, the Christian philosophy of this period not only does not reject but also gives essentially the universal character of the ancient intention to recognize the individual’s right to self-determination and self-government, makes it not only religiously acceptable but also obligatory. Conclusions. Despite to general theocentrism, providentialism and fatalism of Christian medieval philosophy and culture in general, at its epicenter there is a man of a special type, focused on preserving spiritual autonomy and identity in the social dimensions of their existence, and at the same time, on personal responsibility for their own destiny. Such focus became a logical and somewhat unexpected result of the complex interaction of numerous factors of medieval culture, as well as the ideas and intentions inherited from Antiquity. In particular, the idea that a person who does not act freely cannot be morally responsible for what he does, as well as the intentions of the ancient sage to autonomy, autarky, and apoliticism. In the Middle Ages, this intention became essentially universal, as it became a right, even an obligation of every Christian to be free, at least from the worldly, in determining and realizing his own destiny. The gradual compromise recognition that personal salvation is possible only as a result of synergy, i.e. the co-participation of God’s grace and human freedom, legitimizes and strengthens its focus on active personal efforts and personal responsibility for one’s own salvation, in fact for one’s own destiny. All this in historical perspective was found in its radicalized and purified from all sorts of mystical and religious layers of expression in the idea of "Self-made-man". (shrink)

Epistemic logic is one of the most exciting areas in medieval philosophy. Neglected almost entirely after the end of the Middle Ages, it has been rediscovered by philosophers of the twentieth century. Epistemic Logic in the Later Middle Ages provides the first comprehensive study of the subject. Ivan Boh explores the contrast between epistemic and alethic conceptions of consequence, the general epistemic rules of consequence, the search for conditions of knowing contingent propositions, the problems of substitutivity in intentional (...) contexts, the considerations of epistemic/doxastic iterated modalities, and the problems of composite and divided senses in authors ranging from Abelard to Frachantian. Boh concludes with a comparison between medieval endeavors and the epistemic logic of our own times. Written in a clear and readable style with minimal symbolic apparatus, this book employs modern symbolism and conceptual frameworks, and complements the studies of the syntacticand semantic dimensions of medieval logic. (shrink)

'This sentence is false' - is that true? The 'Liar paradox' embodied in those words exerted a particular fascination on the logicians of the Western later Middle Ages, and, along with similar 'insoluble' problems, forms the subject of the first group of articles in this volume. In the following parts Professor Spade turns to medieval semantic theory, views on the relationship between language and thought, and to a study of one particular genre of disputation, that known as 'obligationes'. The (...) focus is on the Oxford scholastics of the first half of the 14th century, and it is the name of William of Ockham which dominates these pages - a thinker with whom Professor Spade finds himself in considerable philosophical sympathy, and whose work on logic and semantic theory has a depth and richness that have not always been sufficiently appreciated. (shrink)

The Middles Ages are often portrayed as a time in which people with physical disabilities in the Latin West were ostracized, on the grounds that such conditions demonstrated personal sin and/or God’s judgment. This was undoubtedly the dominant response to disability in various times and places during the fifth through fifteenth centuries, but the total range of medieval responses is much broader and more interesting. In particular, the 13th-15th century treatment of three groups (martyrs, mothers, and mystics - whose physical (...) ‘defects’ were often understood as signs of special connection to God in this life, and who were often represented as retaining these signs in the life to come) challenge standard notions of beauty, disfigurement, and bodily perfection, particularly as the notion is applied to eternal life and our ultimate end. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to examine Erasmus' attitude toward the medieval past and to relate it to his historical consciousness.

Recently logic has shifted emphasis from static systems developed for purely theoretical reasons to dynamic systems designed for application to real world situations. The emphasis on the applied aspects of logic and reasoning means that logic has become a pragmatic tool, to be judged against the backdrop of a particular application. This shift in emphasis is, however, not new. A similar shift towards “interactive logic” occurred in the high Middle Ages. We provide a number of different examples of “interactive (...) logic” in the Middle Ages, all species of the disputation game obligatio. These games display a recognition of the importance of interaction in logical contexts and the way that interactive logic differs from single-agent inference. (shrink)

Although most predicates may be truthfully predicated of only some beings, there are others that seem to apply to every being. The latter, including being itself, were known as the transcendentals in the Middle Ages and gave rise to the much disputed doctrine of the transcendentals. This article explores the main tenets of the doctrine and the difficulties that they face, the reasons why scholastic authors were interested in these issues, and the origins of the doctrine.

_Epistemic Logic_ studies statements containing verbs such as 'know' and 'wish'. It is one of the most exciting areas in medieval philosophy. Neglected almost entirely after the end of the Middle Ages, it has been rediscovered by philosophers of the present century. This is the first comprehensive study of the subject. Ivan Boh explores the rules for entailment between epistemic statements, the search for the conditions of knowing contingent propositions, the problems of substitutivity in intentional contexts, the relationship between (...) epistemic and modal logic, and the problems of composite and divided senses in authors ranging from Abelard to Frachantian. (shrink)

Introduction The editors of this volume hope that it will prove useful for the study of philosophy in the Middle Ages by virtue of the comprehensiveness of ...